Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Inspired by his reading of Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762–1814) developed during the final decade of the eighteenth
century a radically revised and rigorously systematic version of
transcendental idealism, which he called Wissenschaftslehre
of “Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge.” Perhaps the most
characteristic, as well as most controversial, feature of the
Wissenschaftslehre (at least in its earlier and most
influential version) is Fichte's effort to ground his entire system
upon the bare concept of subjectivity, or, as Fichte expressed it, the
“pure I.” During his career at the University of Jena (1794–1799)
Fichte erected upon this foundation an elaborate transcendental system
that embraced the philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of law or
“right.” and philosophy of religion.

Fichte was born May 19, 1762 in the village of Rammenau in the
Oberlausitz area of Saxony. He was the eldest son in a family of poor
and pious ribbon weavers. His extraordinary intellectual talent soon
brought him to the attention of a local baron, who sponsored his
education, first in the home of a local pastor, then at the famous
Pforta boarding school, and finally at the universities of Jena and
Leipzig. With the death of his patron, Fichte was forced to discontinue
his studies and seek his livelihood as a private tutor, a profession he
quickly came to detest.

Following a lengthy sojourn in Zurich, were he met his future wife,
Johanna Rahn, Fichte returned to Leipzig with the intention of
pursuing a literary career. When his projects failed, he was again
forced to survive as a tutor. It was in this capacity that he began
giving lessons on the Kantian philosophy in the summer of 1790. This
first encounter with Kant's writings produced what Fichte himself
described as a “revolution” in his manner of
thinking. Whereas he had formally been torn between, on the one hand,
a practical commitment to the moral improvement of humanity and, on
the other, a theoretical commitment to “intelligible
fatalism,” he found in the Critical philosophy a way of
reconciling his “head” and “heart” in a system
that could meet the highest intellectual standards without requiring
him to sacrifice his belief in human freedom.

Fichte eventually made his way to Königsberg, where he lived
for a few months. After a disappointing interview with Kant, he
resolved to demonstrate his mastery of the latter's philosophy by
writing a treatise on a theme as yet unaddressed by Kant: namely, the
question of the compatibility of the Critical philosophy with any
concept of divine revelation. In a few weeks Fichte composed a
remarkable manuscript in which he concluded that the only revelation
consistent with the Critical philosophy is the moral law itself. Kant
was sufficiently impressed by the talent of this unknown and
impoverished young man to offer to arrange for the publication of
Fichte's manuscript, which was published by Kant's own publisher in
1792 under the title Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation.
The first edition of this work, however, for reasons that have never
been satisfactorily explained, appeared without the author's name and
preface and was quickly and widely hailed as a work by Kant himself.
When the true identity of its author was revealed, Fichte was
immediately catapulted from total obscurity to philosophical
celebrity.

Meanwhile, Fichte was once again employed as a private tutor, this
time on an estate near Danzig, where he wrote several, anonymously
published political tracts. The first of these was published in 1793
with the provocative title Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought
from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto Suppressed it. In
the summer of 1793 Fichte returned to Zurich where he married his
fiancé and oversaw the publication of the first two installments
of his spirited Contribution to the Rectification of the Public's
Judgment of the French Revolution (1793 and 1794). In this work he
not only defended the principles (if not all the practices) of the
French revolutionaries, but also attempted to outline his own
democratic view of legitimate state authority and insisted on the right
of revolution. Despite the fact that these political writings were
published anonymously, the author's identity was widely known, and
Fichte thereby acquired a reputation, not wholly deserved, as a radical
“Jacobin.”

Following the completion of these projects, Fichte devoted his time in
Zurich to rethinking and revising his own philosophical
position. While maintaining his allegiance to the new Critical or
Kantian philosophy, Fichte was powerfully impressed by the efforts of
K. L. Reinhold to provide the Critical philosophy with a new, more
secure “foundation” and to base the entire system upon a
single “first principle.” At the same time, he became
acquainted with the works of two authors who were engaged in skeptical
attacks upon the philosophies of both Kant and Reinhold: Solomon
Maimon and G. E. Schulze (“Aenesidemus”). It was the need to
respond to the sharp criticisms of these authors that eventually led
Fichte to construct his own, unique version of transcendental
idealism, for which, in the spring of 1794, he eventually coined the
name Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Science” or
“Theory of Scientific Knowledge”). During the winter of 1793/94
he composed a long manuscript, “Private Mediations on Elementary
Philosophy/Pracical Philosophy,” in which worked out some of the
fundamental features of his new system. In Feburary and March of 1794
he gave a series of private lectures on his conception of philosophy
before a small circle of influential clerics and intellectuals in
Zurich.

It was at this moment that he received an invitation to assume the
recently vacated chair of Critical Philosophy at the University of
Jena, which was rapidly emerging as the capital of the new German
philosophy. Fichte arrived in Jena in May of 1794, and enjoyed
tremendous popular success there for the next six years, during which
time he laid the foundations and developed the first systematic
articulations of his new system. Even as he was engaged in this
immense theoretical labor, he also tried to address a larger, popular
audience and also threw himself into various practical efforts to
reform university life. As one bemused colleague observed, “his
is a restless spirit; he thirsts for some opportunity to act in the
world. Fichte wants to employ his philosophy to guide the spirit of
his age.” Indeed, a passionate desire to “have an
effect” upon his own age remained a central feature of Fichte's
character, most notably expressed a decade later in his celebrated
Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in Berlin in 1806
during the French occupation. In Jena, this same desire is reflected
in the enormously popular series of public lectures on “Morality
for Scholars,” which he began to deliver immediately upon his
arrival in Jena. The first five of these lectures were published in
1794 under the title Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's
Vocation.

Though Fichte has already hinted at his new philosophical position in
his 1794 review of G. E. Schulze's Aenesidemus, the first
full-scale public announcement of the same came in a short manifesto
that he published as a means of introducing himself to his new
students and colleagues at Jena and attracting listeners to his
lectures. (As an “extraordinary professor,” Fichte was largely
dependent upon fees paid by students attending his “private”
lectures.) This manifesto, Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre (1794), articulated some of the basic ideas of
the new philosophy, but it mainly focused upon questions of systematic
form and the relationship between philosophy and its proper object
(the necessary actions of the human mind).

Fichte's first truly systematic work was his Foundation of the
Entire Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95). As the title implies, this
work, which remains to this day Fichte's best-known philosophical
treatise, was not meant to be a presentation of his entire system, but
only of the rudiments or first principles of the same. In fact, Fichte
had not originally intended to publish this work at all, which was
written less than a year after his first tentative efforts to
articulate for himself his new conception of transcendental philosophy.
The Foundation was originally intended to be distributed, in
fascicles, to students attending his private lectures during his first
two semesters at Jena, where the printed sheets could be subjected to
analysis and questions and supplemented with oral explanations. Because
of the great interest in Fichte's new philosophy, however, he soon
authorized a public edition of the same, in two volumes. Parts I and II
of the Foundation were published in 1794 and Part II in 1795.
In 1795 he also published a substantial supplement to the
Foundation, under the title Outline of the Distinctive
Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical
Faculty. The title pages of all three of these publications,
however, still stipulated that they were intended only as “a manuscript
for the use of his listeners.” (When, in 1802, Fichte issued a second,
one-volume edition of the Foundation and Outline, in
1801, this subtitle was dropped.)

Dissatisfied with many features of his initial presentation of the
“foundational” portion of his system and shocked by the
virtually universal misunderstanding of his published
Foundation, Fichte immediately set to work on an entirely new
exposition of the same, which he repeated three times in his private
lectures on “The Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy
(Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo” (1796/76, 1797/98,
1798/99). Though he intended to revise these lectures for serial
publication under the title An Attempt a New Presentation of the
Wissenschaftslehre in the Philosophisches Journal einer
Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, of which he himself was by then
co-editor, only the two Introductions to and the first chapter of this
“New Presentation” ever appeared (1797/98).

Even as he was thoroughly revising his presentation of the
foundational portion of his system, Fichte was simultaneously engaged
in elaborating the various subdivisions or systematic branches of the
same. As was his custom, he did this first in his private lectures and
then in published texts based upon the same. The first such extension
was into the realm of philosophy of law and social philosophy, which
resulted in the publication Foundations of Natural Right in
accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre
(published in two volumes in 1796 and 1797). The second extension was
into the realm of moral philosophy, which resulted in the publication
of the System of Ethics in accordance with the Principles of the
Wissenschaftslehre (1798). Fichte then planned to extend his
system into the realm of philosophy of religion. Indeed, he announced
lectures on this topic for the Spring Semester of 1799, but before he
could commence these lectures, his career at Jena had come to an
abrupt and unhappy conclusion in the wake of the so-called “Atheism
Controversy” of 1798/99.

In 1798 Fichte published in his Philosophical Journal a brief
essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the
World,” in which he attempted to sketch some of his preliminary
ideas on the topic indicated in the title and simultaneously to give
the first clear public hint of the character of a philosophy of
religion “in accordance with the principles of the
Wissenschaftslehre.” The occasion for this essay was
another essay, published in the same issue of the Philosophical
Journal, by K. L. Forberg. As it happened, these two essays
provoked an anonymous author to publish a pamphlet charging the
authors of both essays with atheism and demanding Fichte's dismissal
from his post at Jena. The matter quickly escalated into a major
public controversy which eventually led to the official suppression of
the offending issue of the journal and to public threats by various
German princes to prevent their students from enrolling at the
University of Jena. The crisis produced by these actions and the
growing number of publications for and against Fichte—which
included an intemperate Appeal to the Public by Fichte
himself (1799), as well as a more thoughtful response entitled
“From a Private Letter” (1799)—eventually provoked
F. H. Jacobi to publish his famous “open letter” to
Fichte, in which he equated philosophy in general and Fichte's
transcendental philosophy in particular with “nihilism.”
As the public controversy unfolded, Fichte badly miscalculated his own
position and was finally forced to resign his position at Jena and to
flee to Berlin, where he arrived in the summer of 1799.

At this point, the Prussian capital had no university of its own, and
Fichte was forced to support himself by giving private tutorials and
lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and by a new flurry of
literary production, increasingly aimed at a large, popular audience.
The first of these “popular” writings was a brilliant
presentation of some of the characteristic doctrines and conclusions
of Fichte's system, with a strong emphasis upon the moral and
religious character of the same. This work, The Vocation of
Man (1800), which is perhaps Fichte's greatest literary
achievements, was intended as an indirect response to Jacobi's public
repudiation of the Wissenschaftslehre. That same year also
saw the publication of a typically bold foray into political economy,
The Closed Commercial State, in which Fichte propounds a
curious blend of socialist political ideas and autarkic economic
principles. Defending his philosophy against misunderstanding
remained, however, Fichte's chief concern during this period, as is
evidenced by the more direct response to Jacobi contained in his
poignantly titled Sun-Clear Report to the Public at Large
concerning the Actual Character of the latest Philosophy: An Attempt
to Force the Reader to Understand (1801).

At the same time that he was addressing the public in this manner,
Fichte was becoming ever more deeply engrossed in efforts to rethink
and to rearticulate the very foundations of his system, beginning with
his private lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre of 1801/2, and
culminating in the three, radically new versions of the same produced
during the year 1804. Indeed, he continued to produce new versions of
the Wissenschaftslehre right up until his death, delivering
new versions of his system in 1805, 1807, 1810, 1811, 1812, 1813, and
1814 (though the last two versions were cut short, the first by the
war with France and the second by Fichte's death). However, with the
single exception of the extraordinarily condensed (and extraordinarily
opaque) Presentation of the General Outlines of the
Wissenschaftslehre (1810), none of these later versions of the
Wissenschaftslehre was published during Fichte's lifetime.
Some of them appeared, in severely edited form, in the collection of
Fichte's Works published by his son several decades following
his death, but most of them are only now being published for the first
time in the critical edition of Fichte's writings produced by the
Bavarian Academy of the Sciences. It appears that Fichte was so
discouraged by the public reception of the first, 1794/95 presentation
of the foundation of his system that he concluded that it was prudent
to limit future new presentations of the same to the lecture hall and
seminar room, where he could elicit reactions and objections from his
listeners and respond immediately with the requisite corrections and
clarifications. Be that as it may, Fichte never stopped trying to
refine his philosophical insights and to revise his systematic
presentation of the same. Thus there are more than a dozen different
full-scale presentations or versions of the
Wissenschaftslehre, most of which were written after his
departure from Jena. “The Wissenschaftslehre” is
not the name of a book; it is the name of a system of
philosophy, one capable of being expounded in a variety of
different ways. Despite the striking differences between the earlier
and later versions of his lectures on the foundations of his system,
Fichte always insisted that the “spirit” of the same
remained unaltered—a claim that continues to be challenged and
debated by Fichte scholars.

In 1805 Fichte spend a semester as a professor at the University of
Erlangen, but returned to Berlin in the fall of that year. The next
year, 1806, he published in rapid succession three popular and
well-received books, all of which were based upon earlier series of
public lectures that he had delivered in Berlin: On the Essence of
the Scholar (a reworking of some of the same themes first
addressed in the similarly titled lectures of 1794); The
Characteristics of the Present Age (an attempt to show the
implications of his “system of freedom” for a speculative
philosophy of history); and Guide to the Blessed Life, or the
Doctrine of Religion (an eloquent and somewhat mystically tinged
treatise on the relationship between transcendental philosophy and
genuine religion). Taken together, these three “popular”
works are remarkable blends of speculative profundity and rhetorical
eloquence.

With the entry of the French army of occupation into Berlin in 1806,
Fichte joined the Prussian government in exile in Königsberg,
where he delivered yet another course of lectures on the
Wissenschaftslehre and wrote an important short book on
Machiavelli as Author (1807), which defends a form of
Realpolitik that at least appears to contrast quite starkly
with the liberalism and political idealism of Fichte's earlier
political writings. Fichte soon returned to occupied Berlin, however,
where, in the winter of 1807/8, he delivered his celebrated
Addresses to the German Nation (published in 1808). Though
these lectures later obtained a place of dubious honor as founding
documents in the history of German nationalism, they are mainly
concerned with the issue of national identity (and particularly with
the relationship between language and nationality) and the question of
national education (which is the main topic of the work)—both
of which are understood by Fichte as means toward a larger,
cosmopolitan end.

Fichte had always had a lively interest in pedagogical issues and
assumed a leading role in planning the new Prussian university to be
established in Berlin (though his own detailed plans for the same were
eventually rejected in favor of those put forward by Wilhelm von
Humboldt). When the new university finally opened in 1810, Fichte was
the first head of the philosophical faculty as well as the first
elected rector of the university. His final years saw no diminishment
in the pace either of his public activity or of his philosophical
efforts. He continued to produce new lectures on the foundations and
first principles of his system, as well as new introductory lectures
on philosophy in general (“Logic and Philosophy” [1812]
and “The Facts of Consciousness” [1813]), political
philosophy (“System of the Doctrine of Right” [1812] and
“Doctrine of the State” [1813]) and ethics (“System
of Ethical Theory” [1812]). As presaged perhaps by his earlier
book on Machiavelli, these late forays into the domain of practical
philosophy betray a darker view of human nature and defend a more
authoritarian view of the state than anything to be found in Fichte's
earlier writings on these subject.

In 1813 Fichte canceled his lectures so that his students could enlist
in the “War of Liberation” against Napoleon, of which
Fichte himself proved to be an indirect casualty. From his wife, who
was serving as a volunteer nurse in a Berlin military hospital, he
contracted a fatal infection of which he died on January 29,
1814. Almost to the moment of his death he continued his lifelong
efforts to rethink and to re-examine the basic foundations and
systematic implications of his philosophy, as is rather poignantly
reflected in the remarkable philosophical “Diary” in which
he recorded his thoughts during this final period.

The primary task of Fichte's system of philosophy (the
Wissenschaftslehre) is to reconcile freedom with necessity,
or, more specifically, to explain how freely willing, morally
responsible agents can at the same time be considered part of a world
of causally conditioned material objects in space and time. Fichte's
strategy for answering this question—at least in his early
writings, which are the ones upon which his historical reputation as a
philosopher has (at least until recently) been grounded and hence are
the ones to be expounded here—was to begin simply with the
ungrounded assertion of the subjective spontaneity and freedom
(infinity) of the I and then to proceed to a transcendental derivation
of objective necessity and limitation (finitude) as a condition
necessary for the possibility of the former. This is the meaning of
his description, in his “First Introduction to the
Wissenschaftslehre,” of philosophy's task as that of
“displaying the foundation of experience” or
“explaining the basis of the system of representations
accompanied by a feeling of necessity.” Fichte derived this
conception of the task and strategy of philosophy from his study of
Kant, and no matter how far his own system seemed to diverge from
“the letter” of the Critical philosophy, Fichte always
maintained that it remained true to “the spirit” of the
same. Central to this “spirit,” for Fichte, is an
uncompromising insistence upon the practical certainty of human
freedom and a thoroughgoing commitment to the task of providing a
transcendental account of ordinary experience that could explain the
objectivity and necessity of theoretical reason (cognition) in a
manner consistent with the practical affirmation of human
liberty. Though Fichte attributed the discovery of this task to Kant,
he believed that it was first accomplished successfully only in the
Wissenschaftslehre, which he therefore described as the first
“system of human freedom.”

In an effort to clarify the task and method of transcendental
philosophy, Fichte insisted upon the sharp distinction between the
“standpoint” of natural consciousness (which it is the
task of philosophy to “derive,” and hence to
“explain”) and that of transcendental reflection, which is
the standpoint required of the philosopher. He thus insisted that
there is no conflict between transcendental idealism and the
commonsense realism of everyday life. On the contrary, the whole
point of the former is to demonstrate the necessity and unavailability
of the latter.

However “Kantian” in spirit Fichte's enterprise might have
been, he was at the same time all too keenly aware of what he
considered to be certain glaring weaknesses and inadequacies in Kant's
own execution of this project. Taking to heart the criticisms of such
contemporaries as F. H. Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, and G. E. Schulze,
Fichte propounded a radically revised version of the Critical
philosophy. First of all, he argued that the very concept of a
“thing in itself,” understood as a mind-independent,
external “cause” of sensations, is indefensible on
Critical grounds. In addition, he maintained that Kant's denial of the
possibility of “intellectual intuition,” though certainly
justified as a denial of the possibility of any non-sensory awareness
of external objects, is nevertheless difficult to reconcile with
certain other Kantian doctrines regarding the I's immediate presence
to itself both as a (theoretically) cognizing subject (the doctrine of
the transcendental apperception) and as a (practically) striving moral
agent (the doctrine of the categorical imperative).

His study of the writings of K. L. Reinhold convinced Fichte that the
systematic unity of the Critical philosophy—specifically, the
unity of theoretical and practical reason, of the First and Second
Critiques—was insufficiently evident in Kant's own
presentation of his philosophy and that the most promising way to
display the unity in question would be to provide both theoretical and
practical philosophy with a common foundation. The first task for
philosophy, Fichte therefore concluded, is to discover a single,
self-evident starting point or first principle from which one could
then somehow “derive” both theoretical and practical
philosophy, which is to say, our experience of ourselves as finite
cognizers and as finite agents. Not only would such a strategy
guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself, but, more
importantly, it would also display what Kant hinted at but never
demonstrated: viz., the underlying unity of reason itself.

Since it is a central task of philosophy, so construed, to establish
the very possibility of any knowledge or science
(Wissenschaft) whatsoever, Fichte proposed to replace the
disputed term “philosophy” (or “love of
wisdom”) with the new term Wissenschaftslehre or
‘Theory of Science’—a name intended to highlight
the distinctively “second order” character of
philosophical reflection. Though Fichte's proposal never caught on as
a general name for what was once called “philosophy,” it
did become the universally acknowledged name for his own distinctive
version of transcendental idealism. Here again, it is important to keep
in mind that “Wissenschaftslehre” is not the name
of any particular Fichtean treatise, but is instead the general name
for his entire system or project—an allegedly all-encompassing
system that consists of a number of interrelated parts or systematic
subdisciplines and an overarching project that could and would be
expounded in a series of radically different presentations, employing
a bewildering variety of systematic vocabularies.

In order to construct any genuine philosophy of freedom, maintained
Fichte, the reality of freedom itself must simply be presupposed and
thus treated as an incontrovertible “fact of reason” in
the Kantian sense. This, of course, is not to deny the possibility of
raising skeptical, theoretically grounded objections to such claims;
on the contrary, it was the very impossibility of any theoretically
satisfactory refutation of skepticism concerning the reality of
freedom that led Fichte to affirm the inescapable “primacy of
the practical” with respect to the selection of one's
philosophical starting point.

To the extent that any proposed first principle of philosophy is
supposed to be the first principle of all knowledge and hence of all
argument, it clearly cannot be derived from any higher principle and
hence cannot be established by any sort of reasoning. Furthermore,
Fichte maintained that there are two and only two possible starting
points for the philosophical project of “explaining” experience:
namely, the concept of pure selfhood (which Fichte associated with pure
freedom) and that of pure thinghood (which Fichte associated with utter
necessity)—neither of which can be warranted, qua philosophical
starting point, by a direct appeal to experience, and each of which can
be arrived at only by a self-conscious act of philosophical
abstraction from ordinary experience (within which freedom and
necessity, subject and object, are invariably joined as well as
distinguished).

The two rival philosophical strategies made possible by these opposed
starting points are unforgettably limned by Fichte in his two 1797
“Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in
which he characterizes the sort of philosophy that begins with the
pure I as “idealism” and that which begins with the thing
in itself as “dogmatism.” Since, according to Fichte's
earlier argument in Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre, a unified system of philosophy can have one
and only one first principle, and since there are two and only two
possible first principles, then it follows that no “mixed”
system of idealism/dogmatism is possible. Moreover, since dogmatism,
as understood by Fichte, unavoidably implies a strict form of
determinism or “intelligible fatalism,” whereas idealism
is, from the start, committed to the reality of human freedom, it is
also practically impossible to reach any sort of
“compromise” between two such radically opposed
systems.

Though Fichte conceded that neither dogmatism nor idealism could
directly refute its opposite and thus recognized that the choice
between philosophical starting points could never be resolved on
purely theoretical grounds, he nevertheless denied that any dogmatic
system, that is to say, any system that commences with the concept of
sheer objectivity, could ever succeed in accomplishing what was
required of all philosophy. Dogmatism, he argued, could never provide
a transcendental deduction of ordinary consciousness, for, in order to
accomplish this, it would have to make an illicit leap from the realm
of “things” to that of mental events or
“representations” [Vorstellungen]. Idealism, in
contrast, at least when correctly understood as the kind of Critical
idealism that demonstrates that the intellect itself must operate in
accordance with certain necessary laws, can—at least in
principle—accomplish the prescribed task of philosophy and
explain our experience of objects (“representations accompanied
by a feeling of necessity”) in terms of the necessary operations
of the intellect itself, and thus without having to make an illicit
appeal to things in themselves. To be sure, one cannot decide in
advance whether or not any such deduction of experience from the mere
concept of free self-consciousness is actually
possible. This, Fichte conceded, is something that can be decided only
after the construction of the system in question. Until then, it
remains a mere hypothesis that the principle of human
freedom, for all of its practical certainty, is also the proper
starting point for a transcendental account of objective
experience.

It must be granted that the truth of the Wissenschaftslehre's
starting point cannot be established by any philosophical means,
including its utility as a philosophical first principle. On the
contrary—and this is one of Fichte's most characteristic and
controversial claims—one already has to be convinced, on
wholly extra-philosophical grounds, of the reality of one's own
freedom before one can enter into the chain of deductions and
arguments that constitute the Wissenschaftslehre. This is the
meaning of Fichte's oft-cited assertion that “the kind of
philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is.”
The only compelling reason why the transcendental idealist comes to a
stop with—and thus begins his system with—the
proposition that “the I freely posits itself” is therefore
not because he is unable to entertain theoretical doubts on this score
nor because he is simply unable to continue the process of reflective
abstraction. Instead, he appeals to a principle eloquently expressed
by Fichte in his essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Moral
Governance of the World,” namely: “I cannot go beyond this
standpoint because I am not permitted to do so.” It is precisely
because the categorical imperative is in this way invoked to secure
the first principle of his entire system that Fichte felt entitled to
make the rather startling claim that the Wissenschaftslehre
is the only system of philosophy that “accords with
duty.”

The published presentation of the first principles of the Jena
Wissenschaftslehre commences with the proposition, “the
I posits itself”; more specifically, “the I posits itself
as an I.” Since this activity of “self-positing” is
taken to be the fundamental feature of I-hood in general, the first
principle asserts that “the I posits itself as
self-positing.” Unfortunately, this starting point is somewhat
obscured in Part I of the Foundation of the Entire
Wissenschaftslehre by a difficult and somewhat forced attempt on
Fichte's part to connect this starting point to the logical law of
identity, as well as by the introduction of two additional
“first principles,” corresponding to the logical laws of
non-contradiction and sufficient reason. (Significantly, this
distraction is eliminated entirely in the 1796/99
Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, which begins with the simple
“postulate” or “summons” to the reader:
“think the I, and observe what is involved in doing
this.”)

“To posit” (setzen) means simply “to be
aware of,” “to reflect upon,” or “to be
conscious of”; this term does not imply that the I must simply
“create” its objects of consciousness. The principle in
question simply states that the essence of I-hood lies in the
assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness
presupposes self-consciousness (the Kantian “I think,”
which must, at least in principle, be able to accompany all our
representations). Such immediate self-identify, however, cannot be
understood as a psychological “fact,” no matter how
privileged, nor as an “action” or “accident”
of some previously existing substance or being. To be sure, it is an
“action” of the I, but one that is identical with the very
existence of the same. In Fichte's technical terminology, the original
unity of self-consciousness is to be understood as both an action and
as the product of the same: as a Tathandlung or
“fact/act,” a unity that is presupposed by and contained
within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it
never appears as such therein.

This same “identity in difference” of original
self-consciousness might also be described as an “intellectual
intuition,” inasmuch as it involves the immediate
presence of the I to itself, prior to and independently of any sensory
content. To be sure, such an “intellectual intuition”
never occurs, as such, within empirical consciousness; instead, it
must simply be presupposed (that is, “posited”) in order
to explain the possibility of actual consciousness, within which
subject and object are always already distinguished. The occurrence of
such an original intellectual intuition is itself inferred, not
intuited.

Unfortunately, Fichte confuses matters by sometimes using the term
“inner” or “intellectual intuition” to
designate something else entirely: namely, the act of
philosophical reflection or purified self-observation through
which the philosopher becomes conscious of the transcendental
conditions for the possibility of ordinary experience—among
which, of course, is the occurrence of the “original”
intellectual intuition as a Tathandlung. On other occasions,
he employs the term “intellectual intuition” in yet
another sense: namely, to designate our direct, practical awareness
within everyday life of our moral obligations (categorical imperative
qua “real intellectual intuition”). Given the
subsequent abuse of this term by Schelling and the romantics, as well
as the confusion that one sometimes finds among expositors of Fichte
on this issue, it is crucial to recognize systematic ambiguity of the
term “intellectual intuition” in Fichte's own
writings.

A fundamental corollary of Fichte's understanding of I-hood
(Ichheit) as a kind of fact/act is his denial that
the I is originally any sort of “thing” or
“substance.” Instead, the I is simply what it posits
itself to be, and thus its “being” is, so to speak, a
consequence of its self-positing, or rather, is co-terminus with the
same. The first principle of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre is
thus equally “practical” and “theoretical,”
insofar as the act described by this principle is a
“doing” as well as a “knowing,” a deed as well
as a cognition. Thus the problematic unity of theoretical and
practical reason is guaranteed from the start, inasmuch as this very
unity is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness.

After establishing the first principle and conceiving the act
expressed therein, the philosophical task is then to discover what
other acts must necessarily occur as conditions for the possibility of
the original, “simply posited,” first act and then to do
the same for each of these successively discovered acts (or the
theorems in which they are formulated). By continuing in this manner,
one will, according to Fichte, finally arrive at a complete deduction
of the a priori structure of ordinary experience or, what amount to
the same thing, a complete inventory of the “original acts of
the mind.” This is precisely the task of the first or
“foundational” portion of the Jena system.

Just as we are never directly aware of the original act of
self-positing with which the system commences, so are we also unaware—except, of course, from the artificial standpoint of
philosophical reflection—of each of these additional
“necessary but unconscious” acts that are derived as
conditions necessary for the possibility of the originally posited act
of self-positing. Furthermore, though we must, due to the discursive
character of reflection itself, distinguish each of these acts from
the others that it is conditioned by and that are, in turn,
conditioned by it, none of these individual acts actually occurs in
isolation from all of the others. Transcendental philosophy is thus an
effort to analyze what is in fact the single,
synthetic act through which the I posits for itself both
itself and its world, thereby becoming aware in a single moment of
both its freedom and its limitations, its infinity and its
finitude. The result of such an analysis is the recognition that,
although “the I simply posits itself,” its freedom is
never “absolute” or “unlimited”; instead,
freedom proves to be conceivable—and hence the I itself proves
to be possible—only as limited and finite. Despite widespread
misunderstanding of this point, the Wissenschaftslehre is not
a theory of the absolute I. Instead, the conclusion of both the
Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and of the
Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo is that the “absolute
I” is a mere abstraction and that the only sort of I that can
actually exist or act is a finite, empirical, embodied, individual
self.

The I must posit itself in order to be an I at all; but it can posit
itself only insofar as it posits itself as limited (and hence divided
against itself, inasmuch as it also posits itself as unlimited or
“absolute”). Moreover, it cannot even posit for itself its
own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these
limits. The finite I (the intellect) cannot be the ground of its own
passivity. Instead, according to Fichte's analysis, if the I is to
posit itself at all, it must simply discover itself to be
limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as a
‘check’ or Anstoß to the free, practical
activity of the I. Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a
limit for the I only insofar as the I posits it as such. I does this,
according to Fichte's analysis, by positing its own limitation, first,
as a mere “feeling,” then as a “sensation,”
then as an “intuition” of a thing, and finally as a
“concept.” The Anstoß thus provides the
essential occasion or impetus that first sets in motion the entire
complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious
experience both of ourselves as empirical individuals and of a world
of spatio-temporal material objects.

Though this doctrine of the Anstoß may seem to play a
role in Fichte's philosophy not unlike that which has sometimes been
assigned to the thing in itself in the Kantian system, the fundamental
difference is this: the Anstoß is not something foreign
to the I. Instead, it denotes the I's original encounter with its own
finitude. Rather than claim that the Not-I is the cause or ground of
the Anstoß, Fichte argues that the former is posited by
the I precisely in order to “explain” to itself the
latter, that is, in order to become conscious of the same. Though the
Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an
Anstoß must occur if self-consciousness is to be
actual, transcendental philosophy itself is quite unable to deduce or
to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoß—except as a condition for the possibility of consciousness.
Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any
a priori deduction of experience. According to Fichte, transcendental
philosophy can explain, for example, why the world has a
spatio-temporal character and a causal structure, but it can never
explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they
happen to have or why I am this determinate individual rather than
another. This is something that the I simply has to discover at the
same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a
condition for the latter. (It must be admitted, however, that Fichte's
own ambitious descriptions of his project sometimes obscure the
essential limits of the same and that he sometimes gives his readers
the false impression that the Wissenschaftslehre proposes to
provide a complete a priori deduction of all the empirical details of
experience. This however is certainly not the case.)

Despite this important stricture on the scope of transcendental
philosophy, there remains much that can be demonstrated within the
foundational portion of the Wissenschaftslehre. For example,
it can be shown that the I could not become conscious of its own
limits in the manner required for the possibility of any
self-consciousness unless it also possessed an original and
spontaneous ability to synthesize the finite and the infinite. In this
sense, the Wissenschaftslehre deduces the power of productive
imagination as an original power of the mind. Similarly, it can be
shown that the I could not be “checked” in the manner
required for the possibility of consciousness unless it possessed, in
addition to its original “theoretical” power of productive
imaginative, an equally original “practical” power of
sheer willing, which, once “checked,” is immediately
converted into a capacity for endless striving. The foundational
portion of the Wissenschaftslehre thus also includes a
deduction of the categorical imperative (albeit in a particularly
abstract and morally empty form) and of the practical power of the
I. For Fichte, therefore, “the primacy of the practical”
means not simply that philosophy must recognize a certain autonomous
sphere within which practical reason is efficacious and practical
considerations are appropriate; instead, it implies something much
stronger: namely, the recognition that, as Fichte puts it, “the
practical power is the innermost root of the I” and thus that
“our freedom itself is a theoretical determining principle of
our world.” The Wissenschaftslehre as a whole can
therefore be described as a massive effort to demonstrate that reason
could not be theoretical if it were not also practical—at the
same time, to be sure, that also demonstrates that reason could not be
practical if were not also theoretical.

Freedom, according to Fichte's argument, is possible and actual only
within the context of limitation and necessity, and thus it is never
“absolute,” but always limited and finite. On the other
hand, just as surely as a free subject must posit its freedom
“absolutely”—that is to say, ‘purely and
simply’ (schlechthin) and “for no reason”
whatsoever—so must it never identify itself with any
determinate or limited state of its own being. On the contrary, a
finite free self must constantly strive to transform both the natural
and the human worlds in accordance with its own freely-posited goals.
The sheer unity of the self, which was posited as the starting point
of the Foundations, is thereby transformed into an
idea of reason in the Kantian sense: the actual I is always
finite and divided against itself, and hence it is always striving for
a sheer self-determinacy that it never achieves. Between the original
abstraction of pure selfhood as sheer Tathandlung and the
concluding (necessary) idea of a self that is only what it determines
itself to be, in which “is” and “ought” wholly
coincide, lies the entire realm of actual consciousness and real human
experience.

Having established the foundation of his new system, Fichte then
turned to the task of constructing upon this foundation a
fully-articulated transcendental system, the overall structure of
which is most clearly outlined in the concluding section of the
transcripts of his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova
methodo. According to this plan, which has no analog in Fichte's
later writings, the Entire Wissenschaftslehre is to
consisting of four, systematically interrelated parts:: (1) first
philosophy, which corresponds to the “foundational”
portion of the system, as presented in the Foundation of the
entire Wissenschaftslehre and revised in the lectures on
Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo; (2) “theoretical
philosophy” or “philosophy of nature,” (3)
“practical philosophy” or ethics (corresponding to the
content of the System of Ethics); and (4) “philosophy
of the postulates,” which includes the subdisciplines of
“natural law” or “theory of right” (as
expounded in the Foundation of Natural Right) and philosophy
of religion.

By “philosophy of nature,” Fichte seems to have had in
mind something similar to Kant's Metaphysical First Principles of
Nature, though Fichte himself devoted very little attention to
the execution of such a project. The closest he ever came to
developing a philosophy of nature according to transcendental
principles is the compressed account of space, time, and matter
presented in the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the
Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty and
the lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. In neither
of these works, however, does he make any effort to distinguish
rigorously between the “theoretical” aspect of the
foundational portion of his system and a distinctively
“theoretical” subdivision of the same (“philosophy
of nature”). In fact, a “philosophy of nature in
accordance with the principles of the
Wissenschaftslehre” turns out to me even more modest
than Kant's and more closely resembles what later came to be called
the philosophy of (natural) science than it does the speculative
Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel. Indeed, disagreement
concerning the compatibility of a rigorously transcendental philosophy
with a speculative, a priori “philosophy of nature” was
the very issue that precipitated the rift between Fichte and his
erstwhile disciple, Schelling. The popular picture of Fichte's
attitude toward nature, namely, that he viewed the latter almost
entirely from the perspective of human projects, that is, as the
necessary realm for moral striving, is therefore very close to the
truth.

In contrast to Fichte's rather cursory treatment of purely theoretical
philosophy, ethics or “practical philosophy,” which
analyzes the determinate ways in which willing and acting are
determinable by principles of pure reason, constitutes a major portion
of the Jena system, and the System of Ethics is Fichte's
longest single book. Whereas theoretical philosophy explains how the
world necessarily is, practical philosophy explains how the
world ought to be, which is to say, how it ought to be
altered by rational beings. Ethics thus considers the object
of consciousness not as something given or even as something
constructed by necessary laws of consciousness, but rather as
something to be produced by a freely acting subject, consciously
striving to establish and to accomplish its own goals and guided only
by its own self-legislated laws. The specific task of
Fichte's ethics is therefore, first of all, to deduce the categorical
imperative (in its distinctively moral sense) from the general
obligation to determine oneself freely, and, second, to deduce from
this the particular obligations that apply to every free and finite
rational being.

Like all of Fichte's systematic treatises of the Jena period, The
System of Ethics begins with a detailed analysis of what is
involved in the self-positing of the I. In this case, the focus is
upon the necessity that the I posit for itself its own activity or
“efficacy,” and upon a detailed analysis of the
conditions for doing this. In this manner Fichte deduces what he calls
“the principle of all practical philosophy,” viz., that
something objective (a being) follows from something subjective (a
concept), and hence that the I must ascribe to itself a power of free
purposiveness or causality in the sensible world. The I must posit
itself as an embodied will, and only as such does it
“discover” itself at all. From this starting point Fichte
then proceeds to a deduction of the principle of morality: namely,
that I must think of my freedom as standing under a certain necessary
law or categorical imperative, which Fichte calls
“the law of self-sufficiency” or “autonomy,”
and that I ought always to determine my freedom in accordance
with this law. This, therefore, is the task of the philosophical
science of “ethics,” as understood by Fichte: to provide
an a priori deduction of our moral nature in general and of our
specific duties as human beings.

Viewed from the perspective of practical philosophy, the world really
is nothing more than what Fichte once described as “the material
of our duty made sensible,” which is precisely the viewpoint
adopted by the morally engaged, practically striving subject. On the
other hand, this is not the only way the world can be viewed, and,
more specifically, it is not the only way in which it is construed by
transcendental philosophy. For this reason it is somewhat misleading
to characterized the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole as a
system of “ethical idealism.” As noted above, Fichte
certainly does succeed in constructing an account of consciousness
that fully integrates the imperatives and activities of practical
reason into the very structure of the latter, but this integration is
always balanced by a recognition of the constitutive role of
theoretical reason and of the sheer, contingent “giveness”
of the I's original determinacy (doctrine of the
Anstoß).

The final portion of the Jena system is devoted to “the
philosophy of the postulates,” a discipline that Fichte
conceived of as occupying the middle ground between purely theoretical
and purely practical philosophy. In this portion of the system the
world is considered neither as it simply is nor as it simply ought to
be; instead, the moral world is itself considered from the perspective
of the natural world (that is, one considers the postulates that
theoretical reason addresses to the practical realm) or else,
alternatively, the natural world is considered from the perspective of
the moral law (that is, one considers the postulates that practical
reason addresses to the realm of theory). The first of these
perspectives is that of juridical philosophy or philosophy of law, or
what Fichte calls the “doctrine of right”
(Rechtslehre); the latter is that of the philosophy of
religion.

Fichte's philosophy of right (or of “natural law”), as
expounded in his Foundation of Natural Right, is one of the
most original and influential portions of the Jena
Wissenschaftslehre. Written prior to Kant's treatment of the
same topic (in Part One of the Metaphysics of Morals),
Fichte's philosophy of right is notable, first of all, because of the
way in which it distinguishes sharply between the realm of ethics and
that of “right” and tries to develop a complete theory of
the latter (a “theory of justice”) without appealing to
the categorical imperative or the moral law, and secondly, because of
the inclusion within this theory of a thoroughly original
“deduction” of the social character of human beings.

Fichte's transcendental account of natural right proceeds from the
general principle that the I must posit itself as an
individual in order to posit itself at all, and that in order
to posit itself as an individual it must recognize itself as
“summoned” or “solicited” by another
free individual—summoned, that is, to limit its own freedom
out of respect for that of the freedom of the other. The same
condition applies, of course, to the other; hence, mutual recognition
of rational individuals turns out to be condition necessary for the
possibility of I-hood in general. This a priori deduction of
intersubjectivity is so central to the conception of selfhood
developed in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre that Fichte, in his
lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, incorporated it
into his revised presentation of the very foundations of his system,
where the “summons” takes its place alongside
“original feeling” (which takes the place of the earlier
“check”) as both a limit upon the absolute
freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same.

The specific task of Fichte's theory of right is to consider the
specific ways in which the freedom of each individual must be
restricted in order that several individuals can live together with
the maximum amount of mutual freedom, and it derives its a priori
concepts of the laws of social interaction entirely from the sheer
concept of an individual I, as conditions for the possibility of the
latter. Fichte's concept of right therefore obtains its binding force
not from the ethical law, but rather from the general laws of thinking
and from enlightened self-interest, and the force of such
considerations is hypothetical rather than categorical. The theory of
right examines how the freedom of each individual must be externally
limited if a free society of free and equal individuals is to
be possible.

Unlike Kant, Fichte does not treat political philosophy merely as a
subdivision of moral theory. On the contrary, it is an independent
philosophical discipline with a topic and a priori principles of its
own. Whereas ethics analyzes the concept of what is demanded
of a freely willing subject, the theory of right describes what such a
subject is permitted to do (as well as what he can rightfully
be coerced to do). Whereas ethics is concerned with the inner
world of conscience, the theory of right is concerned only with the
external, public realm, though only insofar as the latter can be
viewed as an embodiment of freedom.

Having established the general, albeit hypothetical concept of right,
Fichte then turns to an investigation of the conditions necessary for
the realization or “application” of the same: that is, for
the actual coexistence of free individuals, or the existence of a free
society. The sum of these “conditions” constitute the sum
of our “natural rights” as human beings, rights that can
be instantiated and guaranteed only within a deliberately constructed
free society. On purely a priori grounds, therefore, Fichte purports
to be able to determine the general requirements of such a community
and the sole justification for legitimate political coercion and
obligation.

The precise relationship of Fichte's theory of right to the social
contract tradition is complex, but the general outline is as follows:
Fichte presents an a priori argument for the fundamentally
social character of human beings, an argument grounded upon
an analysis of the very structure of self-consciousness and the
requirements for self-posting. Only after this “deduction”
of the concept of right and of the applicability of the same does he
explicitly introduce the notion of what he calls the
Staatsbürgervertrag or “citizens' contract,”
a notion that he goes on to analyze into a series of distinguishable
moments, including the “civil contract” proper (or
“property contract”), the “protection
contract,” and the “contract of unification,” all of
which must be supplemented by the contracts of
“subjection” and “expiation.” Fichte thus
propounds what one might call a “contract theory of the
state,” but not of human community.

As numerous commentators, beginning with Hegel, whose own
Philosophy of Right was strongly influenced, both positively
and negatively, by Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right,
have pointed out, the actual theory of the state that Fichte himself,
in Part Two of that work, erected upon what would appear to be a
rather “liberal” theoretical foundation contains many
elements that are not usually associated with the individualistic,
liberal tradition—including a general indifference to
questions of constitutional structure, public participation in
government, etc., and a strong emphasis upon the “police”
functions of the state (functions which, for Fichte, were not limited
to concerns of security, but also included those of social
welfare). This, however, is not particularly surprising, since the
function of the state in Fichte's system is primarily to employ
coercion to guarantee that the parties to the contract will, in fact,
do what they have promised to do and to insure that every citizen will
have an opportunity to realize his own (limited) freedom. One of the
more remarkable features of Fichte's conception of right is that every
citizen is entitled to the full and productive employment of his
labor, and hence that the state has a duty to manage the economy
accordingly. The truth is that Fichte's social and political theory is
very difficult to fit into the usual categories, but combines certain
elements usually associated with liberal individualism with others
more commonly associated with communitarian statism.

In addition to the postulates addressed by theoretical to practical
reason, there are also those addressed by practical reason to nature
itself. The latter is the domain of the transcendental philosophy of
religion, which is concerned solely with the question of the extent to
which the realm of nature can be said to accommodate itself to the
aims of morality. The questions dealt with within such a philosophy of
religion are those concerning the nature, limits, and legitimacy of
our belief in divine providence. The philosophy of religion, as
conceived by Fichte, has nothing to do with the historical claims of
revealed religion or with particular religious traditions and
practices. Indeed, this is precisely the distinction between
philosophy of religion and “theology.”

As noted above, Fichte never had a chance to develop this final
subdivision of his Jena system, beyond the tentative foray into this
domain represented by his controversial essay “Concerning the
Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” and the
works he contributed to the ensuing “atheism controversy.”
In “Concerning the Basis of our Belief” he certainly seems
to contend that, so far as philosophy is concerned, the realm of the
divine is that of this world, albeit viewed in terms of the
requirements of the moral law, in which case it is transformed from
the natural to the “the moral world order,” and that no
further inference to a transcendent “moral lawgiver” is
theoretically or practically required or warranted. In this same essay
Fichte also sought to draw a sharp distinction between religion and
philosophy (a distinction parallel to the crucial distinction between
the “ordinary” and “transcendental”
standpoints) and to defend philosophy's right to postulate, on purely
a priori grounds, something like a “moral world order.”
Philosophy of religion thus includes a deduction of the postulate that
our moral actions really do make some difference in the world. But
this is about as far as it can go.

With respect to the existence of God, the argument of Fichte's essay
is primarily negative, inasmuch as it explicitly denies that any
postulate of the existence of a God independent of the moral law is
justifiable on philosophical grounds. In the wake of the atheism
controversy, Fichte returned to this subject and, in his “From a
Private Letter” and in Part Three of The Vocation of
Man, attempted to restate his position in a manner that at least
appeared to be more compatible with the claims of theism.

For much of the nineteenth century, beginning with Hegel's
self-serving interpretation of the history of modern philosophy,
Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre was generally assimilated into
the larger history of Germany idealism. Criticized by both Schelling
and Hegel as a one-sided, “subjective” idealism and a
prime instance of the “philosophy of reflection,” Fichte's
Wissenschaftslehre was almost universally treated as a
superseded rung on the ladder “from Kant to Hegel” and
thus assigned a purely historical significance. Neglected as the
Wissenschaftslehre may have been during this period, Fichte
was not entirely forgotten, but remained influential as the author of
the Addresses to the German Nation and was alternately hailed
and vilified as one of the founders of modern pan-German
nationalism.

This same situation prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century
as well, during which Fichte's fortune seemed closely tied to that of
Germany. Particularly during the long periods preceding, during, and
following the two World Wars, Fichte was discussed almost exclusively
in the context of German politics and national identity, and his
technical philosophy tended to be dismissed as a monstrous or comical
speculative aberration of no relevance whatsoever to contemporary
philosophy. There were, to be sure, isolated exceptions and authors
such as Fritz Medicus, Martial Gueroult, Xavier Léon, and Max
Wundt who, during the first half of the twentieth century, took Fichte
seriously as a philosopher and made lasting contributions to the study
of his thought. But the real boom in Fichte studies has come only in
the past four decades, during which the Wissenschaftslehre
has once again become the object of intense philosophical scrutiny and
lively, world-wide discussion—as is evidenced by the
establishment of large and active professional societies devoted to
Fichte in Europe, Japan, and North America.

J. H. Stirling once quipped that “Fichte had two
philosophical epochs; and if both belong to biography, only one
belongs to history,” and until quite recently there was a great
deal of truth to this observation. Indeed, even today, Fichte's
technical writings of the post-Jena period remain little-known to the
vast majority of philosophers. Admittedly, it is hard to recognize
these late texts—which drop the strategy of beginning with an
analysis of the self, along with the strong emphasis upon the
“primacy of the practical,” and which include
unembarrassed references to an apparently transcendent
“absolute” (“Being,” “Absolute
Being,” “God”)—as the work of the same
author who wrote the Foundations of the Entire
Wissenschaftslehre. Though Fichte himself always insisted that
his basic philosophy remained the same, no matter how much his
presentation thereof may have altered over the years, many sympathetic
readers and not a few well-informed scholars have found it impossible
to reconcile this claim with what at least appear to be the profound
systematic and doctrinal differences between the “early”
and “late” Wissenschaftslehre. It is therefore
not surprising that the problematic “unity” of Fichte's
thought continues to be vigorously debated by experts in the
field.

Whatever one may conclude concerning the relationship between Fichte's
earlier and later writings, it is certainly the case that, with the
publication of numerous, faithfully edited “new”
manuscripts of later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, the
focus of much of the best contemporary Fichte scholarship has shifted
to his later texts, most of which were entirely unknown to earlier
generations of readers. Seldom has a new edition of a philosopher's
literary corpus had a greater effect upon the contemporary reputation
of the thinker in question or a more stimulating effect upon
contemporary scholarship than in the case of the monumental new
critical edition of Fichte's works begun in the early nineteen-sixties
under the auspices of the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and the
general editorship of Reinhard Lauth and others. Now nearing
completion, this edition has contributed directly and enormously to
the contemporary revival of interest in Fichte's philosophy in
general, and in the later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre
in particular. Much of the best recent work on Fichte, particularly in
Germany, Italy, and Japan, has been devoted exclusively to his later
thought. Stirling's observation is thus no longer true, inasmuch as
the work of Fichte's “second epoch” has, however
belatedly, now become the object of genuine and lively philosophical
discussion and dispute.

In contrast, anglophone Fichte scholarship, which has also experienced
quite a renaissance of its own over the past few decades, has remained
largely focused upon the “classical” texts of the Jena
period. This is no doubt due, in large part at least, to the
appearance, during these same decades, of new, reliable translations
of almost all of Fichte's early writings and the lack of translations
of his later, unpublished texts. But it is also a reflection of the
relatively anemic tradition of Fichte scholarship in England and North
America, where even the early Wissenschaftslehre has long
been neglected and under-appreciated. Until quite recently, virtually
no scholars writing in English were interested in examining the
Wissenschaftslehre in its own right, but were mainly
concerned to determine Fichte's position in relationship to Kant's or
Hegel's. This situation, however, has fundamentally altered, and some
of the most insightful and original current work on Fichte is being
done in English. The recent publication of an English translation of
the Fichte's second series of lectures on the
Wissenschaftslehr from 1804 suggests that anglophone Fichte
scholarship is at least ready to begin coming to terms with Fichte's
later philosophy.

Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, 8 vols.,
ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845–46). [Taken together, these 11
volumes, edited by Fichte's son, constituted the first attempt at a
complete edition of his works and are still widely cited and reprinted,
most recently by de Gruyter, under the title Fichtes
Werke.]

Grundriß des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre
in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (1795).
Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with
respect to the Theoretical Faculty, trans. Breazeale, in
EPW.

Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der
Wissenschaftslehre (1798). The System of Ethics in accordance
with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. and
trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum
über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. Ein Versuch,
die Leser zum Verstehen zu zwingen (1801). A Crystal Clear
Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the
Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand,
trans. John Botterman and William Rash, in Philosophy of German
Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler, New York: Continuum, 1987.
[Unreliable translation.]

Neue Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1800). New Version of the Wissenschaftslehre, 1800 [partial translation] by David Wood, in The Philosopical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802), trans. and ed. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood, Albany, Albany, Suny Press, 2012.

Wissenschaftlehre 1804 (second series, 1804). The
Science of Knowing: Fichte's 1804 Lectures on the
Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Walter E. Wright, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2005.

Der Grundzüge des gegewärtigen Zeitalters
(1806). The Characteristics of the Present Age, in The
Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte [henceforth =
PWF], trans. William Smith, ed. and with an introduction by
Daniel Breazeale, Bristol, England: Thoemes Press, 1999. [These
translations were original published between 1848 and 1889.]

Briefwechsel (1790-1802). See the selections from Fichte's correspondence from 1792-1799, trans. Breazeale, in EPW and the selections from his 1800-1801 correspondence with Schelling, trans. Wood, in The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling.

Breazeale, Daniel. Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte's Early Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds. Fichte: Historical
Context/Contemporary Controversies, Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities, 1993. [A collection of essays on various aspects of
Fichte's philosophy. Includes a complete bibliography of works in
English by and about Fichte.]

Neuhouser, Frederick. Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. [A fine example of a
contemporary appropriation of Fichte's thought and of an analytically
sensitive exposition of the same.]

“New Studies in the Philosophy of Fichte,” special
issue of Idealistic Studies, 6 (2) (1979). [A collection of
essays on Fichte in English.]

Pareyson, Luigi. Fichte. Il sistema della libertà ,
2nd ed., Milan: Mursia, 1976. [Along with Philonenko's similarly
titled book, Pareyson's exposition of the early system as a “system of
freedom” is one of the most influential works on Fichte of the post-war
period.]

Radrizzani, Ives (1993) Vers la fondation de
l'intersubjectivité chez Fichte: des Prinzipes à la Nova
Methodo, Paris: Vrin, 1993. [Argues for the continuity of
Fichte's development within the Jena period and for the centrality
therein of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.]

Rockmore, Tom. Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical
Tradition, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.
[One of the first successful effort in English to liberate Fichte's
philosophy from the shadow of Hegel.]

Scribner, Scott. Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the
Technological Imagination, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2010.

Seidel, George J. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre on 1794: A
Commentary on Part I, Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993.
[An elementary introduction to the early system. Written with the
beginning student in mind.]

Wundt, Max. Fichte-Forschungen, Stuttgart: Frommann,
1929. [Another pioneering study of the development of Fichte's
thought, with an emphasis upon the different “spirits” of
the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre.]

Zöller, Günter. Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy:
The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998. [A well-informed and stimulating
analysis of several central themes from the early
Wissenschaftslehre.]

See too the journal Fichte-Studien, Amsterdam and
Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1990 ff., which appears roughly once a year
and publishes papers, most of them in German, on every aspect of
Fichte's life and thought, as well as the occasional newsletter,
“Fichteana,” published by the North American Fichte
Society (and available at their website).